CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to announce Bruce Goff: Material Worlds on view December 20, 2025 through March 29, 2026. This is the first major exhibition showcasing architect Bruce Goff’s work in 30 years. Drawn primarily from the Art Institute’s vast Goff collection and archive, the show features more than 200 works celebrating his unbounded creative practice, including spellbinding architectural drawings, elaborate architectural models, captivating personal collections, and a selection of Goff’s ambitious, lesser-known abstract paintings.

Goff is best known for his groundbreaking, idiosyncratic homes built across the United States, with a special focus in the Midwest and Great Plains. Designed for artists, bankers, and farmers, Goff’s houses combine references and materials from the surrounding landscape with diverse midcentury consumer goods. This approach reflects an alternative kind of site specificity that expands our understanding of organic architecture beyond the work of his lifelong mentor Frank Lloyd Wright.

Goff rejected the minimalist aesthetics and the metropolitan worldview of his modernist contemporaries through his use of unique geometries, including domes, spirals, and tetrahedrons, and a wide variety of unconventional materials including natural elements like coal and goose feathers, and manufactured products like AstroTurf, cellophane, glass cullet, and sequins.

This material diversity is echoed in the exhibition with objects from Goff’s own diverse collections, including seashells and crystals, popular magazines, clothing, and examples of Japanese craft. These personal objects illuminate his unusually broad range of influences encompassing Native American art, queer modernisms, science fiction, and East and Southeast Asian art and music.

“We hope visitors will be inspired by Goff’s expansive worldview and his radical, interdisciplinary practice,” said Alison Fisher, the Harold and Margot Schiff Curator of Architecture and Design. “From monumental churches to avant-garde paintings, this exhibition demonstrates Goff’s singular position within 20th-century American architecture.”

The exhibition will also invite visitors to experience the architect’s intense engagement with music through a customized player piano playing one of his own musical compositions. Goff’s work will be presented in a dynamic exhibition design by New York-based architecture firm New Affiliates, led by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb.

“As the holder of Bruce Goff’s comprehensive archive, the Art Institute is uniquely positioned to present his daring and eclectic body of work to the public,” said James Rondeau, Eloise W. Martin President and Director of the Art Institute of Chicago “The museum is proud to introduce this influential architect to a new generation of museumgoers and highlight new research on Goff’s important career.”

Several companion shows will be on view for the majority of the exhibition. A special rotation of Japanese prints from the Goff estate—35 works dating from the 1930s and 1940s—will be presented in the Art Institute’s Japanese Art galleries. Commissioned photographs by Los Angeles artist Janna Ireland capturing the rich lived spaces of Goff’s Al Struckus House in Woodland Hills, California will be on view in the Modern Wing. Also, newly acquired large-scale drawings by New Affiliates will be installed in the Architecture and Design galleries, responding to the material and labor histories of three important Goff houses.

Bruce Goff: Material Worlds is curated by Alison Fisher, Harold and Margot Schiff Curator, Architecture and Design and Craig Lee, assistant curator, Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago. Themes from Goff’s life and work are explored in a lavishly illustrated catalogue with essays by the curators and scholars from fields ranging from gender studies to musicology.